What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (32 page)

I wonder. Does AA Gill review a restaurant when he has a cold? Because surely, when your eyes are streaming and your head is full of hot mercury and your nose is like a leaky tap, it must be very hard to tell whether you’re eating fish or chicken.

Also, when you are feeling low and miserable, there’s no waitress in the world who will pass muster. She may be smiley and lovely and knowledgeable, but because you are consumed by an overwhelming need to be in bed, with your teddy bear and some warm milk, you will sit there, as she runs you through the specials of the day, wondering how she might look without a head.

I have a similar problem when I have a cold and I have to review a car. Because no matter how comfortable it is, it’s not as comfortable as where I want to be: in bed. And even if it can get from 0 to 60 mph in two seconds, I will fume because that’s not good enough. I want it to get from where I am to where my bedroom is … immediately.

Which brings another problem into sharp focus. We are not allowed to drive a car after we have consumed alcohol or if we are using a mobile telephone or if we are eating a sandwich. But we are allowed to drive while we have a cold. And I think that’s odd. Because – and I’m sure I’m not alone in this – when I have a snotty nose and a heavy head, I am a madman.

You know those turtles that lay eggs so far up a beach that there is no way their young will make it back into the sea without being fried or eaten? Well, they would make better drivers than me when I’m poorly.

Take a recent a case in point. Shepherd’s Bush Green in west
London was closed because of roadworks, which meant everyone in the world was using the Hammersmith flyover. So obviously some bright spark closed that too.

Normally I’d simply sit in the resultant jam, accepting that the people in charge are morons. But because I had a cold, I needed to be at home. So I set off on a hate-fuelled charge through the back streets, hurling insults at absolutely everyone and everything.

Had the dithering minicab driver in the Toyota Camry actually heard what I was saying as he sat there for an age, making no effort to turn right, I’d be in prison now for breaking all sorts of modern-day laws.

Eventually I squeezed by on his left, which meant I may have accidentally popped a couple of wheels on the pavement. And moments later a police officer knocked on my window. I don’t know why, I’m afraid, because before he had much of a chance to speak, I let rip, telling him that the pavement was too wide, that the minicab driver was a stupid idiot and that if he wanted to speak to someone, he should talk to the halfwit who’d shut both main roads into west London at the same time. I then drove off.

The next day the A1 was shut, preventing me from making a meeting on time. So I pulled over and rang various contacts in my phone to shout at them. And that night, on the M1, while running late for my daughter’s school play, I didn’t do as normal and sit behind the stream of Peugeots doing 50 mph in the outside lane. I just overtook them all on the inside, muttering and chuntering like a homeless American drunk.

In short, there was much mayhem and rage and misery. But there was at least one crumb of comfort: the car I was using. An Audi R8 V10.

Normally, when the roads are full of idiots in Peugeots and your head is full of mucus, the last place you want to be is in a low-slung, super-wide, Lamborghini-engined two-seat supercar.

Supercars are tricky. All the things that make them great on
sunny days in the Tuscan hills make them utter pigs in Shepherd’s Bush on a dark, wet Wednesday. They steam up. They pop. They bang. They growl. They won’t fit through gaps. You can’t see out properly. And they are uncomfortable.

The R8, though, has always been different. It feels normal. The cockpit is big. Everything is where you expect it to be and it all works. It can traverse speed humps without leaving 40 per cent of its undersides behind. It’s quiet. It’s unruffled. It is the Loyd Grossman cook-in sauce of supercars. An easy, fuss-free alternative to the complexity of the real thing.

Unless you are at an oblique junction where visibility is a bit restricted, you forget when you are driving an R8 that it is a supercar. It lulls you, cossets you, soothes you. Which is why you are always surprised when you put your foot down and it takes off like a bloody Ferrari. ‘Whoa,’ you say, ‘I thought I was in an Audi TT.’

It grips well too. You might imagine a car that could comfortably handle a farm track – it can and did – would fall over in a bend, but the R8 doesn’t. I’m not suggesting for a moment that it has either the tenacity or the controllability of the (much more expensive) Ferrari 458 Italia, but when it’s raining, and the motorway slip road has tightened unexpectedly, and you haven’t noticed because you’ve been sneezing non-stop for the past 30 miles, you’ll be glad of the four-wheel-drive system, that’s for sure.

There’s something else as well. Thanks entirely to its starring role in
Iron Man
, the R8 is a popular car. People like it, and by association they will like you for driving it. But there has always been one problem: the gearbox. You could have either a manual that came with a lever from a Victorian’s signal box or a semi-automatic that was as refined as a South Yorkshire hen night.

Well, now you can have a seven-speed dual-clutch system. Many car makers are going down this route, saying it brings Formula One-style driving to the road. While not explaining the real reason.

The EU is demanding that engines produce fewer and fewer ‘harmful’ emissions, and gearboxes such as this help a lot. They’re fitted to tick a bureaucrat’s box, not because they make life better for the driver. This is a point you will note at low speed in town. Go on. See a gap and try to exploit it. You can’t. Because the box is either too slow or too jerky – put your foot down and the R8 sets off like you’ve never been in a car before. Really, flappy-paddle gearboxes should come with P-plates.

Of course, out of town they’re great. The gear changes are fast and smooth and can be done either manually with flappy paddles or automatically. On balance, then, I’d say the new box in the R8 paints over the only bit Mamma Achilles missed. It’s a damn good car. It really is. And that from a man who’s spent a week hating everything else.

24 February 2012

The weekly motoring magazine
Autocar
recently published a truly remarkable road test of Jaguar’s new baby sports car, the F-type. Apparently it has been engineered by a man whose superhuman abilities as a boffin are matched only by his unparalleled excellence behind the wheel. He was described, almost homoerotically, as a blend of Jackie Stewart, Mother Teresa and Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist. So not surprisingly his creation is apparently rather special.

We were told that the transmission is silky and beautifully smooth. We learned that the V8 engine produces a tidal wave of torque and that the V6 ‘has the soul of a responsive, agile sports car’. The eulogies went on for page after page, and what made this truly astonishing piece of journalism so extraordinary is that the man who wrote it has never actually driven the car.

He admits that he determined everything from the passenger seat. And the ability to do this, I must say, is a rare gift. He demonstrated his talents the following week by telling his readers that there are subtle differences between the Subaru BRZ and the Toyota GT86. This is true. There are. Both may be made using exactly the same parts, by exactly the same people, in exactly the same factory, but we are told in the official blurb that each car has slightly different suspension settings.

I’ll be honest with you – I drove both cars back to back on the
Top Gear
test track and could not tell them apart. It was the same story with the Stig. I told him that they had differently tuned suspensions, but after many laps he came back in to report that they both felt exactly the same.

Not so, it seems. Because according to our friend on
Autocar
, the Toyota feels slightly softer up front while the Subaru feels a shade more ‘planted’ in faster corners. I felt deeply ashamed not to have spotted this and made a silent vow to redouble my road-testing efforts in the future.

Which brings us on to the new Porsche 911. It’s longer than before and has a wider track. And although 90 per cent of the components are new, it is still very definitely a 911. Except for one thing. It isn’t.

My colleague Richard Hammond is a demented fool, of course, but I’ll give him one thing. He knows the 911 better than anyone and he reckons the new car is a huge step backwards. He tells us that all of the strange little quirks that set this squashed Hitlermobile apart from other cars have been erased in the new model. And that it now feels just like anything else.

He points with special venom at the new electric power steering, saying that this has completely ruined the unique feel. He accepts that electric power steering is necessary for cars to meet new emissions legislation – hydraulic systems take more power from the engine and therefore use more fuel – but he says that as a result of the change, the 911 is George Clooney without the twinkle, Cindy Crawford without the mole.

Naturally the gifted helmsmen on
Autocar
disagree. They say we should not worry about the new electric power steering setup and tell us that, ‘information, rich and abundant, comes streaming through’ the car’s wheel rim. And that all is well.

Allow me to be the judge in this matter. Ready? Here goes. The steering system in the new Porsche works extremely well. If you turn the wheel anticlockwise, you go left. And if you turn it clockwise, you go right. If you do nothing at all, it goes in a straight line.

There’s more, too. If you push the seat back, you end up further from the windscreen. If you turn the heater up, you will be a bit warmer. And if you turn the radio on, music comes out of
the speakers. Unless it’s tuned to Radio 4, in which case you get some Brummies talking about cows.

This is what the 911 has always been about. A taste of the exotic in an-easy-to-use, everything-works package. It’s bloody good value as well. Most interesting cars these days cost upwards of £200,000. They’re so expensive that I was surprised and amazed the other day to find the new Bentley Continental GT Speed is ‘only’ £151,100. But the 394 bhp sequential automatic Porsche 911 Carrera 4S I tested last week is a mere £90,346. And this, remember, is a 184-mph car. So that’s proper performance with a Poundland price tag.

There are some lovely details. It has a satellite navigation system that has been loaded with a current map of Britain. Unlike, say, the Audi R8, which has been given a map not used since your farmer had oxen and all it said over Somerset was: ‘There be witches.’ In one journey in the Audi it simply drove me into a field and gave up. The exact same journey in the Porsche was a breeze.

I also like the way that, in the Porsche, you can choose which sporty element you’d like at any given moment. In most cars, you push the Sport button and it alters everything; the gearbox, the exhaust noise, the steering and the engine response. In the 911 each one of these can be adjusted individually.

I should explain at this point that I am not a 911 enthusiast. But in the same way that a Chelsea fan will admit that behind the gum and the bad temper, Sir Ferguson is a bloody good manager, I can see this is a bloody good car.

There are some niggles, though. When the differentials are cold and you are manoeuvring in a tight space, the front wheels just plough straight on. In this respect, it’s a bit like my P45 micro-car. And on the move, the accelerator pedal feels mushy. There is no instant response from the engine, partly because it’s fed in an old-fashioned way and partly because the new seven-speed gearbox is a bit dim-witted.

There’s something else too. The four-wheel-drive system is a
complete waste of time, unless you live in Val d’Isère. Which you don’t. Or are a road tester on
Autocar
. They say the all-wheel-drive grip makes the car slightly more sure-footed than a two-wheel-drive version. But I’m not sure. I think that on a normal road, it just adds weight, chews fuel and offers absolutely no benefit.

I have more advice on the 911 range. As well as a new cabriolet, in the fullness of time there will be a Turbo and all sorts of hunkered-down, uncomfortable track-day monsters. Forget all of them. A 911 is a sports car, pure and simple. If you add a turbo, it becomes a supercar, something it is not. If you take off the roof, or fit a roll cage or do anything at all, you are adding or subtracting ingredients to a recipe that was fine in the first place.

You buy a 911 like you buy wine in a restaurant. You go for the second cheapest. And that’s the two-wheel-drive Carrera S.
Autocar
agrees with me on this. It says the two-wheel-drive versions are purer and more involving. Doubtless this is so. But more importantly, some of them are more than £17,000 cheaper and make you look less of a plonker.

3 March 2013

One day, when I’m done with shouting and driving round corners too quickly, I want to be the managing director, chief executive officer and Obergruppenführer of Alfa Romeo. Because I want to sort the damn thing out. The first car to be launched under my completely autonomous dictatorship will be a two-seat sports car. It will be a little larger than a Mazda MX-5, it will be rear-wheel drive, it will have a manual gearbox and it will be called the Spider.

Under the bonnet there will be a rorty little 2-litre twin-cam four-cylinder engine that will snuffle and pop on the overrun. It will be fed with carburettors that will cause the EU’s faceless emissions people to write me a strong letter about the need to preserve the world’s polar bears.

I will write back, in extremely strong terms, explaining that I am not interested in polar bears, or glaciers, or how much carbon dioxide there is in the upper atmosphere, because the carburettor is a thing of exquisite delicacy and magnificent simplicity. I will then attach this letter to a brick and throw it through their window.

Afterwards, we have to decide how the car will look. And again it’s not hard. I will walk into the company’s design centre, with a gun, and announce that it is to create the best-looking car made by anyone, ever. Failure to do so, I will announce, while glancing at my AK-47, will not be tolerated.

The end result will look a bit like a scaled-down Ferrari 275 GTS. There will be hints of the Fiat 124 Spider in there too, with notes, perhaps, of the Maserati 3500 GT. It will have wire
wheels. And maybe pop-up headlamps. And if anyone writes to say that these are bad for pedestrian safety, I will find out if they are correct by running them down.

The end result will be beautiful to behold, lovely to drive, as characterful as Jack Reacher and as sought-after as pictures of a naked royal. Money will cascade into the company’s coffers and it will all be spent on a new hatchback in the mould of the old ’Sud. And on bringing back the 159, which was recently dropped for no reason. Because there was nothing wrong with it.

I recently went to see James McAvoy’s new film,
Welcome to the Punch
. In it he drives a 159 and it looked so sensational that I lost control of what was going on. I love that car. I wish it was still with us. I miss it.

I love Alfa Romeos in the same way as old ladies love their cats. I know they are unreliable and stupid and mad. But that’s what makes them seem human. I love Alfas in the same way as Arsenal fans love their team. But, like Arsenal fans, I’m being forced to sit and watch the love of my life being ruined.

My son turns seventeen this month and will be getting a car. But what? Perhaps because he is my son he is about as passionately uninterested in all things automotive as is humanly possible. He knows less about cars than June Whitfield. Actually, come to think of it, he knows less than King Herod.

All he knows is that he doesn’t want a Ford Fiesta because that’s what his big sister drives. And he wants to be different. So I suggested an Alfa. The MiTo, perhaps. The new TwinAir version with the two-cylinder 0.9-litre … his eyes started to glaze over. ‘It’s Italian,’ I said. He liked the sound of that. He likes Italy.

So I borrowed one for a test drive and – Holy Mother of God. It was shocking. Bad almost beyond belief. The idea, though, is quite good. There are plenty of people who would love to be propelled from place to place by this barnstorming little engine with its promise of 60 mpg-plus. But originally it was available only in the Fiat 500, which for many is just too small.

So here it is in the MiTo and it’s as good as ever. It revs like a terrier and makes the sort of noise that causes you to smile. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s very tiny and the MiTo is quite heavy. So while you have the hysterical revs and the comedy noise, you’re still doing only 4 mph.

Time and time again I’d pull over to overtake a Peugeot, pleased with the initial surge of power, but then it would wither and die like a grape in a furnace, and something would be coming the other way, and its lights would be flashing, and I’d have to brake and get back behind the Peugeot again. Fast, this car is not.

It sounds fast. It even looks fast. And it’s an Alfa Romeo so it should be fast. But it isn’t, no matter what you do with the DNA. There is a switch that lets you choose from three settings: Dynamic, which give you nowhere near enough power; Natural, which gives you less; and All-weather, which is irrelevant.

I was happy with all of this. Because, while my son is not interested in cars, he is a teenager. And I very much like the idea of him driving around in something that has exactly the same top speed and acceleration as the Queen.

However, there were some things that were not so good. The gear change was woeful, the ride was catastrophic and I can only assume the driving position was set up for that orang-utan that used to hang around with Clint Eastwood. The pedals are virtually underneath the steering wheel, which means the only people who can get comfortable are those whose arms and legs are exactly the same length.

And guess how much it costs. Nope. You’re wrong. But don’t feel bad, because I was wrong too. I thought that it would be £13,000. But in fact the car I tested, which had one or two small extras fitted, was £16,500. Way too much for any car this size. But for a car this size and this bad it’s a joke.

Of course, you’re paying for the badge. Which is worth a lot, I admit. There’s a lot of symbolism in there: serpents and Milanese legends and a red cross that harks back to the first crusader
to scale the walls of Jerusalem. There’s more, too. Alfa Romeo once won every single race in the Formula One grand prix calendar. It’s where Enzo Ferrari began his career. There’s more heritage and more raw emotion in that symbol than there is in the rest of the car industry put together.

And yet the company has the cheek and the barefaced effrontery to put it on the MiTo TwinAir. It’s like putting the Rolls-Royce badge on a corner shop. No. It’s worse. It’s like Princess Anne appearing in a television commercial for payday loans. It’s simply not on.

So when I take over Alfa Romeo – and it may have to be an armed coup – the MiTo TwinAir will be dropped and any library or internet site that contains a mention of it will be burnt.

In the meantime, though, I think my son will get a Volkswagen Polo. I’ll tell him it’s Italian. He won’t know.

10 March 2013